It was to be nothing special: a fifteen-minute train ride from Newark Penn Station to New York Penn Station. I had done it many times. The late afternoon NJ Transit train pulled out of the station and maintained its slow speed through the city, moving up along MacCarter Highway toward the Lincoln Tunnel.
This was the late seventies, long before any redevelopment of the City of Newark, when dingy industrial yards bordered the railroad tracks. Suddenly my eyes were drawn to a sight outside the dirty train windows. The red-orange sun setting behind the jagged pieces of steel projected black changing shapes. As the train moved, the sun’s color changed as well as the lines and figures partially blocking it. This mystical video, an urban sunset kaleidoscope, held me in awe with captivating beauty.
Time seemed to stand still or collapse—an eternal now — with an overwhelming sense of divine presence. It was nothing less than an epiphany, a mystical moment, a thin space where heaven comes close to earth, leaving me with this revelation: if God can transform and render Newark with such beauty, what could God do with me, or with us? What beauty or divine presence am I missing, in the world and in others if it’s so obvious in virtual junk yards through a dirty train window?
Pelagius reminds us: if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on earth is ugly.
I have been blessed to witness breathtaking sunsets in the San Francisco Bay, Key West, the Bahamas, Puerta Vallarta and Hawaii. None have been more impressionable, none have had the enduring power, and none have moved me more deeply than that sunset in Newark.
We cannot plan, schedule or manipulate epiphanies or mystical moments, but we can be more opened to them. We all have them or miss them. Unfortunately, Western Christian churches and leaders turned mysticism into a specialty, a heightened level of spirituality reserved for the elite. We are all called to be mystics, people of revealed glory, for our very human nature is graced, drenched with the divine life of Christ. I know of many unchurched or even avowed agnostics experience such moments in which time is suspended, all is one, and there is an acute awareness of the transcendent, the sacred, the divine.
Are we missing such sunsets? They may be in the most unexpected times and places. Be still our hearts! Expect the light of glory! We need to keep awake, with eyes of faith wide open– not for ideas or beliefs, but for the revealing beauty of an eternal presence.